Altar of Carnuntum by the Augusti and Caesares

TNMM 524 ↔ CIMRM 1697 & 1698

Altar (H. 1.50 Br. 0.60-0.87 D. 0.385-0.65) the inscription of which was copied for the first time by Pietro de Lama in 1795. Formerly in Graf Traun’s Castle, now in the Museum Carnuntinum.

The back of the altar is rough; its front bears the inscription No. 1698. On the left side Cautes standing, not cross-legged, with an upraised torch and with three ears in his l.h. On the other side Cautopates with torch downwards. In the top a hole and on the top of the front four small holes.

CIMRM 1698

L.H. 0.04-0.06.

D(eo) S(oli) i(nvicto) M(ithrae) / fautori imperii sui / Iovii et Herculii / religiosissimi / Augusti et Caesares / sacrarium / restituerunt.

307 A.D. About the titles Jovii et Herculii etc, W. Seston, Diocletien et la Tetrarchie, I, Guerres et Reformes, Paris 1946, 211ff; other remarks in Carnuntina 1956. E. Polaschek remarks that the inscription is inscribed over a former one, which had been erased (’auf Rasur steht’). Fr. Eichler mentioned that the figures of the two dadophores date from the same period of the first inscription.

Among the monuments discovered in the third mithraeum uncovered at Carnuntum in 1894, there is an altar with representations of Cautes and Cautopates on its sides. This restoration is the consequence of an imperial decision, probably taken during the meeting that took place in this same city, in November 308, between Diocletian, Maximian and Galerius. Mithras is honoured there as protector (fautor) of the Tetrarchy, an ancestral function of the god, already expressed in the Commagenian documents of the 1st century BC, where he is invoked as guarantor of royal power (cf. CIMRM 28). This document, however, is not sufficient to make any of the Augustans a follower of Mithras. The Roman tradition is to honour the deity or deities of the place where one is, if necessary in the impersonal form sive deus, sive dea, in order to preserve the pax deorum.

In Carnuntum, where Mithras had several temples frequented by soldiers in particular, the tetrarchs did not do anything else, even if such a dedication ratified the recognition of the god as a full-fledged member of the ’imperial pantheon’. This evolution can be partly explained by the solar character of a cult that collaterally benefited from the promotion of Sol invictus in the post-Aurelian imperial ideology, even if one must be absolutely careful not to want to identify the two divine powers that are Sol and Mithras.

La première affirmation officielle, claire et nette, de l’appui impérial date de 307, lorsque Dioclétien, Galère et Licinius ont restauré un Mithraeum en qualifiant le dieu de fautor imperii sui ( « protecteur de leur pouvoir »). Certes, la scène se passait à Carnuntum où le mithriacisme avait une position dominante et où les Tétrarques avaient donc intérêt à sacraliser le loyalisme des légionnaires. Mais Galère peut avoir été un adepte du culte tauroctonique.